CEO with Tourettes Mistaken as Visionary

Beaver, UT - Once thought of as a true visionary, CEO of EJBFastCloudXML Global, John Bohnam has just come clean as having tourettes. "It's true. I have tourettes UML PHP. But our committment to EJBFastCloudXML has never been more SCRUM Jira."

The news came as a relief to investors who have been constantly acting like they knew what John was talking about as their strategic direction. His relentless focus on shareholder value service bus has been emulated throughout the industry. Just last quarter, John said the company was on target for delivering WebSockets Clojure Bootstrap for iOS.

Having worked for other 'enterprise' companies, the technical team at EJBFastCloudXML was taking it all in stride.

Representatives at IBM were said to be relieved at the news. "EJBFastCloudXML is an important partner of ours. We have continuously strived to deliver platforms that allowed them to innovate. Sure, the ideas didn't make sense, but that didn't stop us from claiming we built it and charging a whole lot for it."

Outsourcing of Executives Returns High Shareholder Value

Little Rock, AK - Mega IT shop Boracle may have just hit the shareholder value jackpot. For years, Boracle has provided small returns to shareholders, not through organic growth but rather through reduction of costs. First it was outsourcing all of their janitorial work. Then naturally through outsourcing of all of their IT to the lowest bidding company. When that wasn't enough and the company was swimming in its own filth, they did the only natural response and started layoffs. First, with the remaining janitors and maintenance engineers and then finally through laying off their complete IT staff.

"We had to increase growth, which naturally meant we needed more sales feet on the street," said Chip Nothingwell, CEO of Boracle. "Sadly, we couldn't find enough qualified sales staff and thus we are at this difficult decision. We will be outsourcing the rest of our executive team...other than myself of course. I provide vision."

The remaining workers and contractors at Boracle report not noticing any difference as the previous executive staff spoke in intangible nonsense and had no domain knowledge.

"The outsourced executives deliver the same nonsense speech and non-action our previous executives did, just at a fraction of the cost."

Post-its Self Actualize and Kill Scrum Master

Scientists are not sure how, but it is now clear that a wall of post it notes self-actualized and smothered a dictatorial Scrum Master. One project member told us, "We just came in one day and he was lying there, covered in post it notes. When we turned away, some of the notes were back on the wall."

A science team from 3M sent to investigate found that the level of problem solving asked of the post it notes was most likely the cause for their sentient state. "It's important to remember that these things are simply bad glue that became successful. Asking them to problem solve is like asking a Scrum Master to use reason over dogma."

Since the initial incident, reports of unusual post it activity are coming in from around the world. In one case, the post its jumped off the wall and attacked a laptop running a particularly frustrating project management tool. In another case, post its were found that had migrated towards the PMO office in an orderly fashion and were arranged by color.

Leaders researching the problem can only suggest that "people remember that these are merely pieces of sticky paper and that real solutions come from asking questions, a skill that post its have not yet exhibited."

Procastination Retreat 2014 Rescheduled Again

ProcrastinationRetreat 2014 was canceled. If you had not heard of this new retreat, you are right. The organizers never got around to creating its website. We tried to get in contact with the organizers, yet that phone call has been postponed multiple times and we did not hear from them before our deadline. We think this clearly shows that the organizers are really good at procrastinating and we hope that they can organize a conference next year.

We are afraid this won't happen as we heard that while procrastinating for this years event, they have had some creative ideas and are now earning a lot of cash with a time management app.

Metaframeworks (MF) Team Successfully Avoids Adding Value At All Costs

Beverly, MA - Starting what they believe to be a new trend in a trend-hungry industry, the newly-formed Meta-frameworks Team at BigBox, Inc. plans to add value about value by creating frameworks about frameworks. The new team eschews any responsibility for delivering business function, claiming that such matters are "banal implementation details" best left to the drones on other teams to worry about.

The team will be abstracting the "brain-dead" APIs from a diverse collection of development frameworks, starting with Java's Spring and Jakarta libraries. "Those idiots at SpringSource and Apache don't have a clue," said a member of the team, who requested anonymity for "obvious reasons."

The team presented their new APIs at the annual BigBox Technology Forum to a hotel ballroom full of blank stares from baffled technologists and managers. When awkwardly asked what the purpose of the meta-frameworks effort was, MF Team Lead Tim Michaels talked for 45 minutes straight about how his team will protect the corporation from technology change and the leaky abstractions of the "legacy" frameworks they are reworking. When challenged with accusations of resume-padding and just making it impossible to get actual work done, Michaels retorted that "you guys just don't get it" and should "shut the hell up and start learning our new APIs before we drop a new version on your sorry, ignorant asses just to teach you a lesson."

Companies Abandon Quest to be Agile in Desire to be SAFe

Large corporations world wide have been responding well to new methods that promise to make your company "Safe From Agile".

Dan "All the Way to the Bank" Risible, Chairman of the Secure From Agile Pyramid Marketing Consortium, says, "Our new methods offer advice in how to slow down a company's Agile development groups, which have been found to be producing valuable software so rapidly and reliably that the typical "Corporate Behemoth" cannot keep up. Best of all, the cost of these methods requires appropriate capital decision making from the very beginning, and ensures that top management will remain involved in every subsequent decision."

According to well-known industry switch-hitter Ed Facile, "These new 'safe' methods use a variety of techniques to bring effective development teams and their empowered 'product owners' back under the thumb of Those Who Know Best. Used in combination, these techniques are irresistible: any Agile team will either knuckle under or leave the organization entirely."

"It's a win-win" in the view of the newly formed Industrial Dinosaur Front. IDF Spokesman T. Rex Saurian plans to say, at the upcoming Waterfall 2006 conference (TBA): "These furry Agile teams, with all their scurrying around, have got to be stopped. With their warm blood and their frequent releases of desirable features, they are setting our customers' expectations too high. Using new safe and disciplined methods, we can bring this to a stop."

According to reformed agilist Arbite MacFry, "Our group was out of control, producing real value every day, without regard to proper discipline. Fortunately, our new Safe Planning Process injected so many dependencies into our flow that we have managed to bring this rapid progress almost to a complete halt, while increasing integration errors a hundred-fold. Things are much more orderly now and we are out from under the yoke of freedom that had fallen upon us."

Turns out Windows 8 is not Usable

Contrary to popular belief, it turns out that Windows 8 is not usable. Long believed to be the 'ultimate modern user interface', scientists and psychologists spent the last 3 years trying to understand just what made Windows 8 so awesome. It was only then did they realize that Windows 8 is actually not usable - not on a desktop, not on a laptop, not on a train, not in the rain; Windows 8 is not usable.

For most users, the way Windows 8 allowed you to focus for long periods of time on a task such as trying to find your desktop or figure out what time it was, was a refreshing throwback to simpler times. Windows 8 also went against the norm and took the focus away from being connected to the internet consistently, allowing users more time to work on things like trying to find their files.

All of that was for naught. Yes, it turns out Windows 8 is not usable. This is truly a sad day.

Heathcare.gov Saved by Adding 10,000 Mythical Man-months

Today, the US Government selected Accidenture as the solution to issues with Healthcare.gov. Bud Ingidiot, the CMO (Chief Management Officer) of Accidenture's Uber PMO tells us that after four months of documentation, Accidenture is sure that adding 10,000 mythical man months will solve all the problems.

When asked about the solution, Bud told us, "When I sat down to test the website, I quickly found that it worked on my machine. Once I discovered that, it was clear to me that most people simply did not know how to use the website, so we've documented a plan to create the documentation that would help confused users find and understand the many features hidden in the site."

We at The Shallot put our brightest minds on reading the 100K pages Bud created using the Accidentures patented "Begin First Documenting" process, or BFD as they call it. We asked Bud if mythical man months was a wise choice of words in the 21st century, Bud's reply was, "Word choice is really not that essentialistic. It's word count that racks up the billable hours."

After weeks of time spent reading the document, we've learned very little, but we are confused enough that we've concluded the answers must be there, and that the issue is that we are simply not good enough at BFD. After all, any document that is 100,000 pages must contain something.

Post Traumatic IE Syndrome on the Rise

Researchers at MIT have connected high usage of Internet Explorer with a myriad of user issues. Post Tramatic IE Syndrome abbreviated as PTIES, is a latent disease only now being uncovered and its damage fully evaluated.

Overall, heavy users complain of general confusion in daily life with a strong desire to talk about versions. Other victims find they click as often as possible and tend toward paralysis associated with waiting for page refreshes at all times. More serious issues are carpal tunnel stemming from MDC (mouse death clutch) and a haunting, undefined fear when they hear people talk about JavaScript.

Dr C. H. Rome told us, "The best thing we found is to simply sit their people down, and say 'WHY THE HELL ARE YOU STILL USING IE?' This often wakes them from their stupor sort of the like the red pill. All other treatments, including shock therapy have proven ineffective."

It's your choice, but it's clear to The Shallot that the only other epidemic this damaging in recent history stems from people selling XML as "human readable."

Séance Driven Retrospectives are Here!

Professor James Simthworth of Hogwarts University has published research into a relatively unknown style of retrospective. A number of organisations have started implementing séance retrospectives because so many of their projects start off dead that there is a need to tap into the wisdom of the ghosts of projects past. Smithworth is finding that this type of retrospective appeals to organisations with high staff turnover as it enables them to tap into the knowledge of resources that have moved on to other places.

A séance retrospective needs unique skills to facilitate - the IT Medium role is one that is becoming rather valuable and is considered an important specialisation. Unlike other mediums, the IT Medium is communicating with the "resonant energy" left behind after the project team has moved on - the psychic echo of all the arguments, disagreements, back-stabbing, blame avoidance, and political machinations. By reading these faint signals, the IT Medium is able to prepare a report for management which indicates who should be promoted (most effective at manipulating the system) and who should be let go (not tough enough to work here).

Dilbertesqe organisations have snapped up the few IT Mediums available in the market, and there is a definite opportunity for others to learn the role.

New Agile Method announced: SCRAP

Raleigh, NC - A new methodology aimed at reducing defects and increasing reliability in code has been announced. "SCRAP" is a novel combination of Scrum and XP (eXtreme Programming).

SCRAP takes elements from Scrum (the "Scr") and adds in the "P" from XP, but leaves out the controversial "X" (extreme) elements. The "A" crept in when we weren't looking.

The major innovation in the SCRAP method is to take all the code developed at the end of an iteration, and scrap it. Throw it right out. It sucked anyway, you'd be doing the world a favor.

"We've started SCRAPing our code every other Friday, and we couldn't be happier," said Sue Mee, team lead at Cavus-Totum, a leading full-stack applications consultancy. "Our customers are delighted that we're not bugging them with new releases, and our developers have really blossomed. They are now able to learn all kinds of new techniques that they never would have tried before, because they know it's SAFE to SCRAP the code at the end of each iteration."

"This is a real innovation," said Andy Hunt, noted industry observer. "It's a very pragmatic approach to dealing with very real problems. In most cases it really is the best solution to dealing with a huge variety of architectural and process issues."

Critics say that this approach isn't new at all, and was widely practiced in the early days of software development before version control systems became widely available.

"Github is a real problem with SCRAP," said Terry Bull, CTO at Cavus-Totum. "With all that forking going on it's really hard to actually get rid of code completely."

Despite those difficulties imposed by the modern internet, SCRAP is really taking off, with a whopping 97% of companies surveyed by Gaga Group in favor of adopting SCRAP for a majority of their current projects.

A conference for SCRAP enthusiasts is planned for late in 2014, but details are still being thrown out.

Introducing OverReactive Programming

The Shallot has just learned of a new programming paradigm, guaranteed to bring you product success,conference laurels, and at least one article on qInfo. First used in the BMI smart labs, OverReactive Programming is taking the world by storm, though some injuries have been reported...from awesomeness.

OverReactive Programming is completely language and platform agnostic. Like most frameworks and languages developed these days, it is also looking for a problem to solve.

How does OverReactive Programming work? It is beautifully simple. Someone finds a bug in your code? Yell at them about how they don't understand algorithmic complexity. A user complains about your application? Curse at them in German while explaining the nuances of AJAX and JSON. Project Manager got you down trying to make you deliver working software? You punch them in their dirty mouth for questioning your craft.

Upon release of OverReactive Programming, searches on linkedIn by headhunters with awesome overreactive opportunities have skyrocketed.

The Shallot also discovered that the team that came up with OverReactive Programming was working on OverReactive Process as well. However, that team was quickly notified that the SCRUM alliance has a patent on OverReactive Process.

Leaked Java 9 Roadmap Hints at Support for Structs, Preprocessing, and Templates

The Shallot has received a leaked internal memo from Oracle corporation that hints at what the Java development community might expect from Java 9. The memo indicates engineers are currently working on adding capabilities that will enable the use of structs, a preprocessor (primarily for macro expansion), and C++ style templates. The new direction can only be described as puzzling after the recent addition of lambda expressions, parallel operations, and concurrent accumulators in Java 8.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, an engineer on the Java team offered this explanation, "Look, we all know the primary usage of Java is for creating imperative, procedural style programs. Nobody is really going to do functional programming with Java. Hell, they don't even use it for OO. Why make someone jump through hoops creating a DTO when a struct is all they need?" When asked to explain the reasoning behind the support for the preprocessor and C++ style templates the engineer replied, "We were getting tired of the smugness coming from some of the tool vendors. Let's see them get automated refactorings working now."

If the support for structs sounds appealing for reasons of simplifying your codebase you may want to reserve judgment. Rumor has it the current development implementation of structs requires the addition of eleven new keywords to the language in order to support backward compatibility.

Pivoteers, Inc Celebrates Ten Years of Pivoting

This week the San Francisco based company Pivoteers, Inc celebrated ten years of pivoting. "We started this company because we enjoy toying with ideas," CEO John Grasmes said on this occasion. "We continued it because we were curious how long could we raise money from investors. It turns out that failure is so appreciated in Sillicon Valley that you can keep pivoting without releasing any working product and still manage to raise funds."

When asked what the future holds for the company, Mr. Grasmes said, "I see a bright future ahead where we continue pivoting for at least ten more years. We just hope we won't stumble into a black swan that will make us instant money, because then we'll have to really start developing a product."

Mr. Grasmes used to be a programmer, but sources say he got fed up with how managers were treating him and decided to start his own venture instead. He also changed his name to a "more CEO-sounding name." His income cannot be properly estimated due to his uncommon business model, but he is known to take 6 month world tours each year. A team of 50 people work at Pivoteers, Inc, although work is hardly what they do. Some employees told us that their everyday job is to "read Garfield comics" and "watch 'The Big Lebowski' while waiting for the sequel". Many CEOs have confessed off-record that they admire the strong company culture of Pivoteers, Inc, based on the company motto - a quote from Ronald Reagan - "I've heard that hard work never killed anyone, but I say why take the chance?".

Scrum Alliance Proclaims COBOL 'The' Programming Language to Watch

COBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Language) appears to be having a Renaissance of sorts. First introduced in 1959, COBOL quickly became the darling of computer programmers from all facets of business including military, universities, and various private sectors.

Decades later COBOL is still powering corporations around the world and bootstrapping IT-Startups have begun to take notice, sending fresh-eyed troops of developers through Scrum Alliance's new Certified COBOL Programmer (CCP) training.

According to Mr. Wheaton, "After 2 days of introduction to COBOL, programmers take an open book exam, receive certification, and are proclaimed experts in COBOL programming allowing them to seamlessly transition from their old ways into COBOL's structured language and syntax."

CCP training starts at $1297 and Wheaton advocates signing-up as seats are filling quickly and are on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Self-Directed Team Chooses Command-and-Control Structure: Waits for Manager to Make Decisions

In an unexpected, but logical, turn of events, one of the self-directed work teams at Top Down Enterprises, Inc. selected a command-and-control structure for their next development assignment. Todd Shinkle, a team member, explained. "We've tried that self-directed shit before. It's too much work. You really have to think. Hard. As contractors to the government, we don't need it. We don't want it." Shinkle continued, "We'll just let our manager make all the decisions. It will be easier on us and, if the project fails, it will be clear who's to blame."

Mona Mowery, another team member, nodded in agreement, "That's right. Making important decisions is above my pay grade. I'm not taking that responsibility. Not for what they pay me."

Could this be the next management wave to come crashing on our organizations? We'll have to wait and see.

d.A.N.G.E.R. Framework is Now Most Popular Framework for Scaling Agile.

Although many people were talking about RIP (Real Incorporated Program) In the nineties, it seems to have died at the start of the new millenium. Therefore we are really happy that d.A.N.G.E.R. has become a popular successor for this forgotten pearl.

One aspect of it's succes is comming from the fact that it's the first agile methodology that is targetted at distributed teams. All the outsourcing companies can now finally also use agile. Although we heard of agile coaches complaining about d.A.N.G.E.R. requiring them to buy a walking desk to do their coaching at home, business owners are really happy as for the first time, thanks to d.A.N.G.E.R. they also have a visibility on the velocity of their coaches. The statictics clearly show that coaches (now called Dean's) that there is a relation between the stepping speed of the Deans and the growing of the enterprise refactoring of their teams.
(Deans stands for d.A.N.G.E.R. enterprise agile nerds)

Another part of the succes, is due to the viral marketing aspect of becomming a certified Dean. People are becoming a certified Dean by editing their Linkedin profile and adding a position as Certified Dean with a link to articles like this one.

Agile's Most Coveted X-Prize Might Have Its Winner

IBM has reached yet another frontier in software engineering. Although Scrum has promised hyperproductive teams for over a decade, a small group of dedicated programmers, testers, and one visionary project manager have discovered the secrets of hypoproductivity. Housed in IBM's spacious offices north of Toronto, Canada, Michael Rabinsky leads a team that has met goals independently raised by the #NoEstimates movement: they have transcended velocity and productivity. "Other groups use Scrum to increase productivity, pushing their burn-up charts, trying to accelerate towards hyperproductivity. I... well, we found the software project equivalent of a wormhole. I long suspected it existed, and one Tuesday afternoon, while playing ping-pong on the fourth floor, it came to me."

Rabinsky remembered a little-publicised quirk of working at IBM. "You see, everyone who works here has a number. That number represents how long they can go without producing any real results before someone notices and they get fired. They still appear busy, they show up at meetings, they send emails, but it can take weeks, months, even years before it becomes a big-enough problem for their bosses to want them fired. See that guy in the corner, there? His number has made it up to about 27 years. When I saw him that afternoon in the lounge quietly reading a book in the ceorner, I realised: if I gathered 4-6 people whose numbers measured in the decades, then I would have the ultimate high-leverage team: they would produce absolutely nothing with effectively zero risk of losing their jobs."

"That," Rabinsky told me dramatically, "is the essence of hypoproductivity. We've living the dream. Thanks, Ken." Rabinsky refers to Ken Schwaber, thought to be the first Scrum proponent to reveal the promise of hyperproductivity.

Other teams, in order to achieve hypoproductivity, have had to take the long route. "First, they accelerate their productivity. Scrum makes that easy. Then their velocity tends towards infinity. You might need a little XP for that. Finally, you need your velocity to wrap around from positive infinity to negative infinity, to go from perfect hyperproductivity to perfect hypoproductivity. That's where my... our wormhole comes in. I... we jumped straight to hypoproductivity, and I think that in the next few years, we'll achieve literal, perfect, negative infinity velocity - they'll keep paying us, even though we're gradually causing all of IBM to collapse on itself."

Turning to the whiteboard behind him, Rabinsky added, "That burn-down chart has us getting there sometime between 2Q2016 and the 2030s. Cross your fingers!"

This startling breakthrough has given Rabinsky and his team a shot at winning the long-sought-after John Goodsen prize, which includes a million-dollar prize and a lifetime supply of high-quality, single-malt scotch for the entire team. This prize was established in 2004 to support cutting-edge research into hypoproductivity. There are, however, rumors of a group within British Telecom coming dangerously close to a similar breakthrough.

Luke Endorses Darth for Evil Skills

Hot off the wire, Linked In reports that Luke Skywalker has endorsed Darth Vader for evil skills. When asked about the endorsement, Luke told us "While the force is strong, it's nothing compared to social media. Of course everyone knows that Darth (or Dad as I like to call him) is evil, we need all the hype we can get for the upcoming film." It seems that endorsing people for obvious skills is the obvious fad to follow.

Darth on the other hand, finds less to smile about (in general). Darth believes that Linked In is not dark enough and he prefers connecting with others in odd realms he has built in MindCraft. Darth went on to say that "the endorsement is sort of like Jesus endorsing God." The Shallot did some digging and found out that Jesus has endorsed God and as expected, God has many connections.

We wish the best to all non-humans on Linked In, Twitter, and Facebook. It's clear to us that social media clearly has gone where no tools have gone before, and that many of the journeys are, as Darth (or Spock) might say, "Interesting".

On a side note, Luke voiced his concerns about Disney's control over the film, but ask that we did not comment further as the only thing he fears more than the dark side is the mouse police.

Scrum Team Abandons Story Points for Bitcoin

Anxious to get in on the trendy move to cryptocurrencies, one scrum team has moved away from estimating in story points in favor of bitcoin, a purely digital currency that is not backed by any government. "It's great," enthuses Lyle Carlson, agile coach at Rampson Tuttle, "because the inherent variability of bitcoins reflects the uncertainty of the estimating process. And since the exchange rate of bitcoins to dollars is known, we can easily convert our estimates into cost for our stakeholders, so they know at any time how much they're spending to get a given feature."

The initial response from senior management has been mixed. "Having a clear executive-level dashboard that shows delivered value based on the burn-down charts is great," according to Robert Tuttle, CEO of Rampson Tuttle, "and it's much easier to convert directly from bitcoin to dollars, rather than all this tomfoolery of dividing up points by the number of resources and checking the time-tracking system to back out PTO so we can really understand how much a given feature costs. But our costs are still in dollars, so calculating ROI is tough."

Plans to move to compensating employees in bitcoin rather than dollars are underway, but have met with some opposition from employees who have raised concerns about the volatility of bitcoin.

Conference of 30 Year Old White Males Discusses Diversity

Vail, CO - The winter may be cold and snowy, but this conference is melting that polar vortex. Angered and not adequately represented, over one hundred 30 year-old-white males have descended upon this town to talk about diversity in conferences; a conference to fix conferences.

"We noticed a growing problem in our community. We don't feel like our conferences are reaching their complete audience," said Brock Brogram, conference organizer. "For instance, did you know that JavaOne is attended by almost no white males my age... with mustaches? They all go to the Ruby conference. Trying to organize a mobile development conference? Good luck getting white males named 'Ted' there. It's just not fair, and we are going to change it."

The Shallot was able to get a sneak at some of the sessions on dock for the conference.

'Using Crude Jokes'

'Pictures tell a thousand words'

Asking The Wrong Question (AWQ) Certifications on the Rise

Looking for the right certification to scratch your itch? Tired of certifying in technologies and processes that come and go? The Shallot has uncovered something for you - the certification to end all certifications - Certification in asking the wrong question.

Instead of worrying about understanding a process, learn to ask such gems as 'How will it scale?' and 'But has it worked in my domain?'

Sick of following JavaScript this and NoThat? Try out this beauty - 'Will it work in the cloud?'

Trying to be innovative or 'user focused'? Don't start thinking, that would be crazy and possibly hard. Instead learn how to ask 'What would Apple do? I heard Google has 20% slack time' For you quick readers, yes that last one wasn't a question.

While classes for this new certification are filling up fast, some reviews have been mixed. 'I've been asking the wrong question for years,' said Brian Peavey, Enterprise Architect.

Recursive Redundence Releases Jockstrap.js

While attending his 200th Javascript conference of the year, reporter Brites Honyobejct stumbled across Jockstrap.js, the Javascript framework with the stated goals of "kicking ass on all other frameworks." The makers, Recursive Redundence, swear that their framework is capable of finding other competing frameworks in your code and beating them into submission.

RR founder, Dr I. Knowit All told us "At Recursive Redundence, we pride ourselves on building things that are fast and cool. We avoid worrying about whether they work well or provide any real value. We simply want people to talk about what we do so we can quickly turn a profit by selling our product to some huge company for an exorbitant sum. I mean after all we are JS.js, how much more Uber does it get?"

Brites reports that using Jockstrap.js feels like a helpful blow from the captain of the sports team you once quit. That said, Brites has committed to making it work because he chose JS.js as the js framework for The Shallot and we are now stuck with it.

ScrumMasters Meet, Raise Technical Debt Ceiling

Pie Town, New Mexico - This past weekend, ScrumMasters from across the globe came together to this bustling little town to discuss what has been holding projects at the brink of disaster for years - the technical debt ceiling. Currently sitting at over 47 trillion technical debt dollars, the global technical debt has been skyrocketing towards the agreed ceiling of 50 trillion technical debt dollars, gaining 10 trillion in the past 6 months alone.

While all sides of the discussion agreed on how critical raising the ceiling was, negotiations were not easy. Lee Guru (PMI, CSM - U) was against raising the technical debt without further concessions. "We need more protection from the Product Owner. We need guarantees of no contact during sprint, not just no scope. No looking at us, not questioning our work. Well, not my work, I don't know anything about code, but you get it."

No one that knew how to write code or test was allowed to attend the meeting as knowledge of technology was viewed as an impediment and had to be removed.

At the end of the meetings, the ScrumMasters had come to a consensus to raise the technical debt ceiling by another 25 trillion. 'Raising technical debt is way easier than actually understanding and maintaining product focus,' said Alotta Nonsense, spokesperson for ScrumMasters global. 'And I'm confident in continuing to push this debt ceiling until we find a meaningful product.'

Cognitect Announces Clojure Core Object System (CCOS)

This Shallot report has just learned that Rich Hickey is currently working on a dynamic object system in Clojure called the Clojure Core Object System (CCOS). The announcement has caused a flurry of incendiary comments on Twitter and other social media outlets. The clojure community is currently in a state of revolt.

When asked why he was making such a radical shift in philosophy Hickey explained, "A few weeks ago I was in the middle of an HDD session (editor's note: HDD is an acronym for Hammock Driven Development) and I was contemplating Whitehead's concept of eternal objects. I kept on thinking of the number 3 and the question kept appearing in my mind - 3 what? In a sudden flash of insight, I realized the arguments I've been using for not realizing objects in software also hold for functions. There are no functions. So, why not objects?"

Hickey went on to explain that he is doing everything he can to make objects in CCOS immutable. For example, the core system will not support setter methods. Where immutability cannot be avoided, he's capturing all state changes to an object's state forever, a technique particularly easy to implement when using Datomic for persistence. However, he also acknowledged CCOS has a rich meta-programming model that will make it a trivial exercise for others to add setters.

Stu Halloway tweeted "I still don't think OO is valid for anything except maybe UIs, and that's a BIG maybe." The future of Cognitect as a company is uncertain at this time.